Just in time to prepare for our upcoming session, I’ve finished running all of the smaller one-on-one sessions for all of my players from my every-other-week game of Heart: The City Beneath. I feel like I’ve managed to at least partially maintain the game’s tension and even add to it a little bit by giving each character some focused attention (to move their personal plot forward) and by keeping up a steady (if small) stream of information in the Discord server I built for my this group. I still (as of writing this) have a lot to do to finish preparing for the session since I actually know what the group is going to do ahead of time for once, but it’s work I’m genuinely excited to do since I’ve figured out how to tie the stories of all my players together in this moment. Maybe not permanently (the improvisational nature of our game makes that impossible to claim with any confidence), but enough to give us a major inflection point in the overal game as we walk up to and past what might actually be the halfway point of this campaign.

I still think we’ve got a lot to learn as a group playing Heart, but taking this time to play in much smaller groups means that I’ve been able to help shore up other people’s understanding of how the game works. The beat system for advancement (pick a type of narrative beat to assign to your character and gain a related type of character advancement when you complete the beat) can make for a great, communicative game, but only if everyone is on the same page about how that system works. One of the places where my group has struggled so far is that everyone was very focused on minor beats to shore up their initial skills and abilities, which means the first person to pick a major beat got latched onto in a way they didn’t expect. All of these beats are plot beats, they’re supposed to reflect a step along each character’s journey, so I built a small Session (or mission) in the game that pivoted around the character meeting the beat her player had selected. Since the player had only seen minor beats before, they were caught off guard by how central their character had become in that moment and wasn’t prepared for all the narrative attention I sent their way. Now, though, I’ve talked to all my players about the beat system and worked more closely with them to figure out what target they want to throw their character at or at least the kinds of paths they’re interested in seeing their characters walk down.

That was my main goal with these smaller sessions, after all: to figure out what my players wanted out of the story we’re crafting so I could make sure the two of us (and as many of the other players in the group as was possible) were pulling in the same direction. Thankfully, as it turns out, pretty much everyone’s goals all pull in more or less the same direction for now, so I was able to get them all neatly woven together in a way that should be fun for them all to play out. It might take a while to get there, since I wound up deciding against writing a summary of each mini-session for the discord to read, but I am working to adapt the game’s overaching Sitatuion/Session based structure to fit the way we’re all playing the game. We’ve basically done one two-session Session and one three-session Session and this next arc looks like it might take a good deal longer than either of those two and I don’t want to thumb the scale of my players abilities that heavily since more and more of them have “once per Session” type abilities now. I have some ideas, of course, but it will take actual experience and practice to see if they’ll actually work out the way I want them to.

In order to make that happen, I need to prepare more monster stats, brush up on my Delve structuring, reread some of the stuff I’ve read about how the parts of the world fit together in Heart (specifically the ones that are tied to mechanics), and make sure I’ve dotted my “i”s and crossed my “t”s with all the foreshadowing I’ve been doing (some of which my players might not even realize is foreshadowing since I have no idea how much of the book they’ve read beyond the parts of it strictly related to their characters). I’ve only got two days left to prepare as you’re reading this, so hopefully that’ll be enough time to get the stats figured out, enough names generated, and a general structure laid out so I can focus on the narrative beats my players have assigned their characters rather than the crunch and grind of moving the game along mechanically. Not that there’s a lot of that. I just need to have actual, concrete numbers for the moments those matter, rather than be making them up on the spot.